Monthly Archives: February 2013

This is definitely one of the most unique furniture collections I’ve seen in a long time. Livingstones are a series of couches, chairs, footstools, cushions and tables that are all made to look like smooth rocks and pebbles.

While they may appear to be cold and hard the Livingstones pieces are actually as soft and comfortable as regular furniture and come in a wide variety of natural slate colors. As you can see the fabric used is even textured and detailed to simulate the surfaces of real rocks.

Unfortunately for those of us in North America looking at their website the Livingstones appear to be only available at a collection of shops in and around Europe.

It’s pretty obvious the makers of the Duck Fader made every effort to avoid getting the legal smackdown from Lucasfilm but come on… ‘Fader’? I mean I’m pretty sure Lucas doesn’t own the word ‘Vader’ and calling this the ‘Bathtime In-Vader’ just seems like the more obvious solution here.

Anyways if you’ve yet to find a way to combine your obsession with Star Wars and your love for baths the Duck Fader will finally bring those two worlds together. Available in blue, green, purple and red (who would choose anything but red btw?) the Duck Fader also ominously glows to really bring out the evil in its eyes.

If I could find a way to be sicker than I am now, I’d have to be awarded a price of some sort. I’m hoping that the morning dew will bring along with it peace to the firestorm in my stomach (see, I’m a poet!), but chances are your Tuesday morning will be spent OhGizmo-less. Andrew is also out, far as I know, so my apologies to you all.

At the moment, the Orgasmatron 3000 isn’t much more than an art project by one Dominic Wilcox, a project that happens to stretch the meaning of “art” a little, but what the heck. He’s covered an everyday washing machine in leather, stuck a saddle on it and relabeled the dial to go from “Oh!” to “Oooooooh!”.

Yeah, that’s pretty much it, though now that the idea is out in the wild, we’re convinced that it’s only a matter of time before this thing is, if not mass-produced, then at the very least sold to lonely housewives worldwide in small quantities.

It’s interesting to think that we’ve reached an age where we very well might be stuffing some stockings with 3MP digital cameras; 3MP digital cameras which then will most likely dangle from a keychain. Yeah, that’s right: everyone’s favorite store, Hammacher Schlemmer is selling a keychain camera that takes pictures of 2560 x 2048 resolution in still mode, does 320 x 240 video and even triples as a 640 x 480 webcam. It comes with a slide out LCD of unspecified size, though the entire unit is impossibly small at 1.5″ H x 2.5″ W x 0.75″ D., which does indeed make it a good keychain candidate. On-board memory is a paltry 8MB, so you’re going to want to boost that up with an SD card. Transferring of data is then done via USB.

While Chris’ (from Slashgear) first reaction to the Xun Chi 138 concerned its possible impact on the disturbing art of rectal transportation, we prefer to think of the marvelous advances in miniaturization that have allowed this handset to be produced… Ah, who are we kidding? Yes, if you positively must smuggle a cellular phone into prison by concealing it into your anal cavity, perhaps this is the one to do it with. It weighs 55 grams and is 2.64 inches long, and is quite possibly the smallest mobile we’ve ever come across.

To achieve this feat, the keypad has been ditched in favor of a 260k color touchscreen LCD. Also, there’s no Bluetooth, nor any expansion slot. It does however feature a 1.3MP digicam (though it seems to only take VGA shots; perhaps the 1.3MP figure is upsampled, then), GPRS, MP3 player and handwriting recognition. Word is that it’s being made somewhere in China, in Shenzhen City, and may venture onto the rest of the world pending translation of the firmware into English and French.

We won’t get cocky, and lecture you about the importance of VoIP, Skype and its potential impact on the telecommunications industry; these are things you should already know. We believe that any product which makes it easier to switch to VoIP is God’s little way of saying “See there, I don’t hate you that much.” And while there are tons of products out there that interface with the popular software, and we couldn’t dream of listing them all, the Vo300 USB Internet Speakerphone, from Kensington does so somewhat elegantly, and at a relatively moderate price.

As a speakerphone should, the Vo300 allows for hands-free calling through Skype, though the fact that it’s connected via USB means there’s more than simple audio interfacing: through an LCD screen on the device, it’s possible to scan your contacts, view your call status and call history as well. And should you want to make a particular call private, you can also connect a headset. There’s also echo-cancellation and one-button access to Skype Voicemail.

It’s $90, which is perhaps only $20 more than we’d like to have to pay for something like this.

The only thing more fun that getting a cold call from someone pitching life insurance is getting three freaking phone calls, the same day, for the same thing, from the same company, due to some database glitch. And while they all got hung up on after about six seconds (enough to figure out what they wanted), that’s still 18 seconds of my life I’m not going to get back. If only I’d had the CallBlocker device. It answers the phone for you, before it starts ringing, and tells the other person what’s what. Here’s the default message, though you can change it if you want:

?You have reached CallBlocker and not an answering machine. All commercial sales calls and fund raising requests are not accepted, place this number on your do not call list. Personal and invited callers press 5 on your touch phone to proceed.?

Of course, any self respecting scumbag sales guy will just ignore this and pitch ahead, but I’m thinking that if there are enough profanities in the message, perhaps they’ll get the hint.

The iGamez from PressMan Toys sounds like it could get hella boring in a hurry. It’s basically little speakers with a buzzer button. Plug your music device in (the lowercase “i”, along with the picture would want to suggest an iPod, though any will do), have the operator choose a song, and the first one to guess it has to press the button and gets a point if he’s right.

Now, I’d suggest cranking up the fun factor a bit, and introducing some libations into the mix. How about choosing some really obscure songs, and getting everyone to take a shot for a wrong answer? Or something of the sort.

We’re not sure how much this is, nor are we willing to sift through the site’s poor design to find out. This is as low-end as things get, and if you really want it that much, you do the work.

OhGizmo! is a frequently updated blog that focuses on covering items that will appeal to a very specific and often very passionate audience: the geek. Aside from the fare of innovative consumer electronic products, the reader can expect to find news about geek culture, absurd inventions, awe inspiring technology, and an ever growing assortment of articles that we like to think fit within our view of what we’re calling the Geek Lifestyle.